Q&A: Reason Versus Emotion
Reason Versus Emotion
Question
With God’s help
Hello Rabbi,
I feel that ever since I started delving into your writings, especially the 5 notebooks, on the one hand I received a systematic and in-depth analysis of faith, but on the other hand I lost the intuition I used to have. I’ve already stopped feeling and experiencing the things I believe in. I stopped trusting myself and my intuitions to prove to myself that something is true. About everything I think maybe it isn’t true because I don’t have definitive proof for it, and sometimes even about nuances that you proved in the notebooks I become filled with doubts.
The truth is that at first I felt good about it, that I wasn’t accepting things at face value but was someone who thinks and analyzes everything. But when it became part of life, it already became bothersome and disturbing. I feel that it’s hard for me to function this way, and I took your method a bit too extremely, because by nature I don’t analyze every single thing to that extent, but rather take things in with ordinary thought together with reliance on feeling and intuition. But since I was exposed to your fundamental, analytical method, I have the sense that anything that isn’t done that way is not correct, and I have no ability to prove everything to myself on such a high level. And even if I have an intellectual proof, I think maybe there is another answer to it and maybe intuition is misleading me, and sometimes these things are so subtle that it’s hard to decide about them. It’s hard for me to create the right balance between the analytic and the synthetic, and to live with “emotional reason.” It seems to me that I’ve lost the proper balance, because things that were simple for me until a year ago (like belief in God, in the Torah, in the Sages) have suddenly become doubtful despite your proofs, and to a certain extent this harms my joy in life, when I don’t have something certain and absolute to go by. I feel that this is not the way, but it’s no longer clear to me what is, and where the boundary lies.
I would be happy if you could help put things in order in my head.
Thank you very much
Answer
Hello Y.,
I think that even if you analyze everything, you have to know how to take it and how to relate to it. The purpose of analysis is to check whether you have any errors. If you didn’t find any, then worrying that maybe you’re mistaken is really not constructive and not helpful. The Torah was not given to ministering angels, and human beings cannot attain certainty. I’ve written several times that I am completely in favor of intuition; it’s just worth examining it through analysis. If the analysis does not refute it, there is no reason to abandon it. The burden of proof lies on the side that rejects the intuition. So suspicion toward natural feeling and our intuitions is a healthy thing, but it is supposed to cause us to reexamine our intuitions, and after we’ve checked them and they have not been refuted, to remain with them. Fears that maybe I am mistaken should be ignored as long as you have no way to do anything about them.
Discussion on Answer
As I wrote, even if intuition stands at the foundation of the analysis, the analysis is still important. It can reveal to you contradictions between intuitions, or between them and facts and other assumptions, and expose additional intuitions that you were not aware of. As long as the analysis has not contradicted your intuition, there is no reason at all not to stay with it, and on the contrary, that is the right thing to do.
With God’s help 2
Good morning,
Thank you for the response.
A. I notice that in intellectual analysis, doubts will always arise, and it is almost never possible to reach a total decision. The fact is that there are also people who think the exact opposite of me, so clearly my proof is not compelling.
B. In your articles you mention a lot the emptiness of the analytic, so I ask: if the analytic is ultimately influenced by hidden intuitive assumptions, then why not simply trust the strong intuition I have and follow it without needing to analyze it? After all, even in any cold intellectual analysis there will always be subtle doubts (section A) that we will have to decide based on intuition, so we’ve gone in a vicious circle back to intuition and the analysis has added nothing for me. Intellectual analysis should come only where a doubt arises for me in the intuition and it becomes undermined, but without doubt, why is analysis preferable when in the end it too rests on intuitions?